Japan is already on Christmas Day and we're on Christmas Eve so hopefully folks are getting prepared as best as we can during this COVID era for Santa and all that.
Earlier this month, I provided an article on a 1987 Christmas song by GWINKO called "Gwinko's Christmas Carol" with its Motown taste. Good ol' Scott (who has a bunch of his J-Xmas podcasts out at his site, so why not give those a gander?) then recommended me a November 1988 album of J-Xmas tunes titled "Dance to Christmas".
"Dance to Christmas" has its own J-Wiki article and I discovered there that singer-songwriter Yoshiyuki Osawa（大沢誉志幸）and a number of singers under the CBS/Sony banner decided to get together on the work for this special project to celebrate the 10th anniversary of EPIC/Sony. Therefore, Masayuki Suzuki（鈴木雅之）, his sister Kiyomi（鈴木聖美）, along with Osawa, GWINKO, Masatoshi Nishimura（西村麻聡）of FENCE OF DEFENSE and others all put on their Santa hats and got busy.
The second track is "Merry Christmas Go Round", a boppy City Pop boogie of the Yuletide involving a duet between GWINKO and Osawa himself. Written by K. Inojo and composed by Osawa, the song also has a touch of jazzy swing in there as the two singers act like a couple of flirty lovers dancing around a good old date over the Holidays. If all of the couples around Christmas time acted like these two do, cars would have ended up being banned off the roads because of all of the boogying around. I couldn't find out any liner note information but I do wonder whether the Suzuki siblings themselves were providing background vocals.
How cool! I hadn't seen the videos before. I especially like the live videos. "Dance to Christmas" is a fun compilation, although this is probably my favorite song from the album.
ReplyDeleteHi, Scott. Yeah, the official music video for "Merry Christmas Go Round" is especially adorable.
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